


the centre cannot hold;

by Owlship



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Apocalypse, End of the World, Gen, Trope Bingo Round 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 13:31:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6196924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlship/pseuds/Owlship
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the end of the world.</p>
<p>(And no one feels fine)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the centre cannot hold;

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Yeats' "[The Second Coming](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172062)" because I remembered that it existed and re-read it and then this little fic fell out.

The world is ending.

The world has been ending for years upon years, now, but not like this.

It’s a creeping blackness, a spreading _nothingness_. Patches of wasteland that are simply… not there, anymore. As if the world is splitting open at the seams, revealing the void beneath.

Max watches someone drive into the black-hole edge, once, near the beginning of it. Their wheels hit the border like driving under a sheet of fabric, like moving through a waterfall.

The sound of their engine and their defiant laughter is swallowed by the emptiness, their tire tracks abrupt where they end.

He watches, and watches, and nothing ever comes back out. The sun starts setting and he thinks he can see the blackness expanding, contracting, _breathing_.

Max forgets about the bike he was trying to salvage, the reason he’d stuck around long enough to see the driver push into that aching abyss. He turns his back on the emptiness and he _runs_.

There’s nowhere to run to.

The lurking void at his back slips beyond the horizon sometime during that restless night, seems like something he might have dreamed. No one speaks of anything like it; but, he concedes, no one speaks much of anything.

He finds himself at what used to be a coastline, toxic water filmed over with salt and slick oil and the rotting jerkied carcasses of those less fortunate creatures. Max has visited here or somewhere like it before, driven as the winds of chance dictate, found it no less hospitable than the burning sands of inland.

This time he’s sure he sees the edges of the blankness spread, marked out sublimely on the white-crusted plain. Slow and inexorable the remains of the sea vanish into its maw; gone is the horizon, the sky, the salt-laden breeze.

Max watches, transfixed in horror to see the world unravel so completely, until the nothingness is close enough to throw a stone into.

He runs, even though there’s nowhere to run to.

The blankness spreads, dogs at his footsteps, consumes everything with terrible hollow nothingness. Small patches bloom here and there in the shadows; a cricket hopping under some scrap never to be seen again, a dislodged rock that hasn’t the chance to clatter, fires that illuminate nothing long before they are snuffed out.

The world is ending and for perhaps the first time, this frightens him.

What few non-hostile people Max meet don’t speak of the blankness, the nothingness, but he sees it in their eyes. They curl in on themselves as if not giving voice to the dread will keep it at bay, as if there isn’t already a gaping chasm gnawing its way in from the edges of the world.

He finds himself at the base of three tall stone bluffs again and isn’t surprised that they seem to glow from within with life still. The people inside take him up without question, say nothing of his absence or the reason for his return, and for a short while he can walk to the highest point and see swathes of unending wasteland and sky, comforting in their wholeness.

A sandstorm roars outside, loud and terrible and familiar, and then disappears into the vacuum.

Max tracks the blankness creeping in along their western border, springing up in puddles and dripping from the patchwork sky, hungry and insidious and inescapable.

They lose their last trade convoy. A patrol never returns. No one steps out onto the sands if they can help it. Soon the only exhaust is from the generators, the hydro pumps. There isn’t anywhere left to drive _to_.

One day he walks down to the lower workshop only to find that it isn’t there. Max stays on the stone-cut stairs and stares into the blankness and thinks, for a long moment, about stepping down into it. The world is ending, after all; it’s only a matter of time.

Instead he turns around and walks back up, slow and weary because there’s no point in running.

There isn’t anywhere to run to, never really has been.

Of those whose names he knows, Capable disappears first, lost between one turn in the hallway and the next. In another tower Toast flashes mirror messages across the distance until one day her spire is gone.

The sun never rises again and Cheedo and the Dag tie a thin cord between their wrists, spend most of their time in what rooms still have windows until the door vanishes with them behind it.

Furiosa works tirelessly through it all to keep things running, to stockpile food and water and what humanity remains, hardly stopping to rest, until one day there’s only the one floor and three empty rooms and no one else left and she just _stops_ , like she’s come unwound.

“It’s the end of the world,” she says to Max on the last night, curled up with him on the bare floor because the pallet was consumed already, kerosene lantern flickering in and out of existence. The void howls with terrible quietness at the edges of the room, greedily sending out tendrils to eat through the dim light.

He remembers a joke to finish the phrase, a faraway song’s echo playing through the air, but the words won’t come to him. Maybe the blankness is inside his head already.

Max twines his fingers with hers, holding on tightly for both their sake’s, a point of connection that is the last thing either feels when the nothingness finally, silently, breathes in to cover them.

The world ends.


End file.
